Set in Gaza in 2007, Once Upon a Time in Gaza is a complex genre-bending drama from the Nasser brothers that blurs the line between reality and cinema. Mixing noir, Western, and political satire, it follows the lives of Palestinians lived under the zionist blockade, where love and loyalty coexist with occupation and concept of martyrdom.
Directed by: Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser
Year: 2025
Country: Palestine, France, Germany, Portugal
Length: 90 minutes
The Nasser brothers begin their latest feature with a jolt: Donald Trump’s voice, pulled from a February 2025 clip, declaring Gaza’s “unbelievable potential.” Over it, we see a flurry of images: martyr posters rolling off a printing press, a funeral procession draped in the Palestinian flag, gunfire in the streets. In one cut, the chaos gives way to the greenery of Israeli settlements, presenting a strong contrast between the lives of those colonized and their colonizer
The setting is 2007, the early period of the blockade. The sound of occupation is constant; airstrikes in the distance, news broadcasts announcing further restrictions, newspaper headlines warning of the next assault. Even when the plot focuses on small human exchanges, the siege is never absent.
At the center is Osama (Majd Eid), a falafel shop owner with a wrist injury from the intifada. Struggling with pain and short on options, he steals prescriptions and slips into small-time dealing. What could have been played as cynical survival is instead grounded in charm and vulnerability. Osama’s masculinity is defined by brotherhood and affection for his friends, not machismo. He jokes, cares for others, and mourns when he runs over a stray cat. The friendship with the quieter Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay) has an understated intimacy that becomes the film’s emotional focus.
The Nasser brothers push their story through sharp tonal shifts. There’s jazzy, noir-inflected music, flashes of Western-style showdowns, and later, a film-within-a-film about Gaza’s “first action hero.” They treat genre not as an escape from politics but as another way to confront it, showing how narratives are shaped even under siege.
The cyclical structure of the film makes it stand out from other works. The film begins and ends with the same kind of public ritual, making the repetition of violence and mourning feel inescapable. Lives are caught in loops where personal ambition, even something as improbable as acting in a movie, can’t break free from political reality.
The film’s portrait of Gaza in 2007 is textured. Shortages of fuel, rising prices, the near-impossibility of travel to the West Bank. People dream of an airport, a port, an open passage to the outside world. Yet the state of siege is normalised to the point where it becomes part of the soundscape, part of every conversation.
Once Upon a Time in Gaza a film that is both tightly directed and carefully written, with plot beats that land without heavy exposition. Still, there’s a political tension in how it closes. Due to the screenplay’s complexity, the ending can easily be -wrongfully- read as an anti-Hamas statement, a framing that risks aligning with narratives that diminish Palestinian agency at a moment when Palestinians are facing genocide at the hands of their zionist occupiers.
Once Upon a Time in Gaza is complex, contradictory, and visually striking. It invites you in with humor and intimacy, then snaps back to the bleak realities for those living under blockade, depicting life in a long-lasting circle of occupation, violence and mourning.
“Once Upon a Time in Gaza” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it screened as the opening film of this edition’s Un Certain Regard selection
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